It’s 7:15 p.m. Tuesday in Los Angeles and 7:15 a.m. Wednesday in the United Arab Emirates. The professor looks into a webcam and calls class to order on two continents.
It is all part of a Loyola Marymount University initiative that gives deeper meaning to globalization. That’s because there is much more to the groundbreaking nature of this class than that the classrooms are 7,200 miles apart.
The students at LMU and at the Al Ain campus of United Arab Emirates University are studying “Media and Politics of Asia”  taught by Tom Plate, Distinguished Scholar of Asian Pacific Studies at LMU.  Plate brings a good deal of experience to his LMU classes, having been a journalist more than 40 years, including stints as the opinion page editor at New York Newsday and the Los Angeles Times.
And Plate has held Internet-linked classes before, but what has him enthusiastic about this is how different the students’ cultures are from each other. “It’s an attempt to teach, in real time, between two very different cultures – an Islamic/Arabic culture that is very serious about its values and its vision of the world, and a university that has Catholic origins, indeed Jesuit origins,” he said.
“The fact that it’s LMU – which is Catholic and Jesuit –only adds extra value to the joint initiative from UAEU’s standpoint,” Plate said. “Because now, you’re talking Islam and Catholicism and we’re going to try to make this work. Instead of a clash of civilizations, we’ll have a harmony of civilizations.”
The LMU class will meet in a third-floor room in William H. Hannon Library, which is wired to accommodate this complex communication. The UAEU students will be able to interact with the LMU students —  from a similar classroom in the UAE — as if they were in the same room. “I think a lot of the learning is going to be in the interaction,” Plate said. “That’s why I’m hawkish on the technology.”
Plate emphasizes projects in his classes, and expects intercontinental group work will play a role in the success of the class.
Because of a slight difference in academic calendars, there will be roughly 12 weeks of common instruction, when the two classes will hear lectures and discussions, and four weeks at the beginning  when the LMU class will earn about the media of West Asia, the Persian Gulf states and United Arab Emirates.
Plate came to LMU in 2010. He has been a longtime syndicated columnist specializing in Asian politics and cultural affairs.  He is the author of three books in the Giants of Asia series: the best-selling “Conversations with Lee Kuan Yew,” “Conversations with Mahathir Mohamad,” and the upcoming “Conversations with Thaksin.” He is the founder of the Asian Pacific Media Network and the Pacific Perspectives Media Center.
